You are not doing a post-graduate degree to stay the same. In fact in Pressfield’s words “The last thing we want is to remain the same“.

However, you will experience resistance. Seth Godin talks about quieting the lizard brain, or the amygdala, that part of your brain that are responsible for fear, rage and reproductive drive.  You need find a way to manage it…

I will be one of the first to submit that it is difficult to do a couple of simple things necessary to be much, much more successful at ventures (like post-graduate studies).

So here is some points from “Do The Work”

Stay stupid. You have no idea how difficult it is to get your research question answered, but you need to be cocky enough to believe that you can pull it off anyway. Don’t think. Act!

Be stubborn. Don’t stop. You are in it now – the worst thing you can do is stop. With post-0graduate studies you don’t stop, you move forwards, or backwards, there is no standing still.

Blind faith. In yourself and you abilities… in your creativity. If you believe you can’t, you are indeed correct. Have faith that it works the other way round as well – it does.

Passion. If you are not passionate about your subject field don’t even think of doing post-grad work… start running, run fast and run in another direction.

You will meet resistance. Accept the fact, but fight the resistance with stupidity, stubbornness, blind faith and passion.

So how do you begin?

Begin now, before you are ready and you too can succeed. Don’t wait for the right moment – it never comes, it is the job of the resistance to keep it away, and the resistance is very good at that!

What does your lizard brain tell you? Identifying the actions of the lizard brain is a good start at fighting them. In the comments share with me what your lizard brain is telling you…

As humans we tend to want the one BIG thing. If only I could win the lotto… If only I could buy that car… if only I did not have to do that… BUT life seldom works that way.Sure, somebody does win the lotto… but the odds are stacked heavily against it being you…

Of course not all things are equally big… but when the smallest thing is occupying your mind it is BIG…

I am particularly guilty of the “If only I did not have to do this…” line. This week it would be “if only I did not have to mark these supplementary papers…”

However we forget that life is not “if only” – no, life comprises many, many things, and if we are lucky the number of great things are much more than the number of not-so-great things.

I don’t think I have the recipe for being creative, but here’s three things that I noticed just kills my creativity.

1. Clutter. Sadly I seldom feel creative in my study… why? Too much clutter, too much things to draw my attention away from what I want to do. Clutter makes it easy to feel busy, overwhelmed even, but creative moments need the opposite.

2. Not enough fresh air and sunlight. The more I walk, the more I sit outside, the more I want to create something. Inside it is easier to feel tired, to sit or worse slouch, to lie down and sleep.

3. Being a model consumer. Does not matter what we consume: entertainment? Food? Books? Now there is nothing wrong with a good book, or a good book, or fine dining, but there seems to be an unhealthy limit. Consuming too much… of anything, makes you lazy.

I try and counteract 2 and 3 a bit in my life (could do more), but maybe its time I do something about no 1, my study… not sure what though, just cleaning/neatening up is not going to do it…

I often plan for an eight hour day… IT NEVER WORKS !!! Sometime last year I paged through a Slideshare (which unfortunately I could not locate again since) that listed some things the author wished he knew earlier. All the items was reasonably agreeable, so much so that I forgot all of them; except for one that really resonated: Only plan for a 4-5 hour day!, the rest will take care of itself…

I then realized that that is my main mistake: I think in terms of eight hour days, but for some mysterious reason seem to ‘just forget’ that all 8 hours cannot just be ‘productive’. Now you may be in a completely different job than mine – maybe your job can only survive if you can bill 8 hours a day to clients, or maybe you do something that fits a more standard norm – but if you do some knowledge work requiring dealing with people chances are we are in pretty similar boats…

So why plan for only 50% of my day? No it’s not because I’m a lazy bastard (at least not only, lol), but due to a range of factors. It seems to be extremely difficult to estimate writing time, planning to write a certain volume sometimes takes three hours, and sometimes 30 minutes. Interruptions are part of the job – a student looking for an explanation, a parent phoning,… Interestingly some of my best ideas pop into my head when I’m doing completely unrelated work. Reading about a topic can easily lead you to new ideas, rather important in my job, and impossible to plan for…

My main time management resolution for the year: plan only 4-5 hours work per day. That way I will still end up working 10-12 hours some days, but maybe, just maybe I can have a couple of more normal 8 hour days…

Full disclosure: This post is the direct result of not listening to myself today… Maybe I’ll be finished with today’s planned work by tomorrow evening…

Maybe you have some time management tips you can share with me? I’ll be grateful if you drop a comment… I need all the help I can get!

When one is young, birthdays are great, a real highlight on the calendar. If not for the parties, definitely for the presents. You dream about the presents… As life progress the presents matter less, much less, but the birthday stays special nevertheless.  Birthdays, I think, eventually becomes days to celebrate friendship and love, about the privilege and blessing of having had another year with those that you love… with your family, with your friends.

I realized again that it does not matter what you receive on your birthday, those are blessings undeserved… What matters most are the people around you… the people you celebrate with…

The late Stephen Covey in his best-seller “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” urges us to think about what people would say about us at our funerals. He identified 4 contexts: family, friends, work, church/community. A rather morbid exercise, but it drives the idea of “beginning with the end in mind” home very effectively.

I want to apply this idea to birthdays though – a lot less somber. Who will be celebrating next year’s birthday with me? What will we talk about at the party? Why would you bother to join my party?

I hope that the answer will lie in what I have done for you…

Mostly it is the choices we make.  Here is some of those nasty decisions I often have to make…

• Do I catch up on reading my 367 unread RSS entries, or write a new blog post?
• Do I eat that huge piece of cake, or not?
• Do I watch yet another rerun of yet another series/movie, or do I go for a walk?
• Do I read a book and share the message, or do I  just put it back on the shelf when done?

Why are these choices not obvious… What most people would see as the ‘better’ choice, seem to take something from you – the passive, go-with-the-flow options in most cases is much easier… but in all cases provide short-term gratification.

When did I get so lazy? This is my first blog post in a long while, even after saying I would blog again on 2 Jan… I rest my case.

How about you? What choices do you need to confront? Do you manage to make the right choice? Please share your thoughts with me in the comments.

2013 was in many ways a strange year for me. I did lots of stuff I loved, I spent much more quiet, thinking time than other years – this certainly helped in bringing order to my introverted mind. I don’t think I’ve been “letting go” the way I intended at the beginning of the year. So my grading:

Light: B+
Love: A
Liberate: D-

Maybe one can argue that I’ve had limited success, but I’ll give it another go: My words for 2014:

Scaffold: I’m worried about scaffolding from two perspectives – my students, and what I provide to them to empower them, myself, and what I put in place to do future projects I wish to do.

Skills: In IT these have the tendency to get outdated at an unbelievable speed. However, I am not only talking IT skills…  I see this year as  a renewal year for me…

Share: This has been on the agenda for a long time, and while I do a not too bad job in the small, I suck at it in general. More time to work on it and drop my perfection streak.

OK, let’s see how it will go…

Just a reminder of previous years’ words:

• 2011: Active, Balanced, Creative, Deliver
• 2012: Prioritize, Purge, Play

Both time life might not have worked out quite as planned, but regardless I found the exercise useful, so I am repeating it this year.

My three words for 2013: Light, Love, Liberate.

Allow me to contextualize these words:

Light.  The amount of light determines what we see. In her book on introverts (Quiet: The Power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking) Susan Cain says

The secret of life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some it’s a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamplit desk. Use your natural powers – of persistence, concentration, insight, and sensitivity – to do work you love and work that matters. Solve problems, make art, think deeply.

So ‘light’ makes me think of caring about the environment I put myself in. In some way it also relates to the 2012 ‘Purge’ guidance – I intend to cut down on the clutter, physically and mentally, and create an environment in which I can be more effective and productive.

Love. Does this needs explaining? Do the things that I love. Of course some things need doing anyway, but the key here is to strike a balance.

Liberate. This I mean in the sense of setting free, letting go. I am one of those who way too frequently hide behind the excuse of “It’s not perfect/ good enough yet’. Quite a difficult ‘habit’ to break, but in 2013 I will try to liberate more of my ideas and outputs…

I know I am ready for 2013! What about you, what do you plan on doing/changing/delivering this year?

My three beacons were: Prioritize, Purge, & Play. This is how I score myself:

Prioritize – A-. I managed to quite often ask myself “why?”. Why would i want to do this or that? Why must I do that? What would happen if I did not do x? Overall i managed this quite effectively; not perfectly by all means – I still way too often fall in a rut where I do whatever comes up and not stand critical to what I spend time on. Of course, some things must happen whether you want to or not, but the key here would be to strike the balance. I certainly got a little bit better this year at moving unimportant, but necessary tasks off to times I do not feel particularly creative.

Purge – B. Doing the prioritization effectively made purging easier. I certainly purged a lot of physical things (especially in my study) although I am not certain that those unfamiliar with my study would be able to tell: clearly more work needs to be done. Blogging was one of the things that i purged (as you may have noticed), but in retrospect that was not the right thing. I missed some of the ordering of thoughts, but at the same time realised that I need more of a goal with my writing. In terms of purging activities I’ve been pretty OK, but in terms of purging ‘things’ I have a long way to go.

Play – C+. OK, it is official, I am way too serious. I really struggled to ‘play’. This holds for what ‘normal’ non-nerdish people consider play, but sadly also for nerd-play. I have intended exploring many fun nerdish stuff that i just did not get too… Need to work on this – it is probably the one really good advantage of being an academic, and i am not using it too its fullest. It is particularly sad for me since the last six months I spent on sabbatical – good opportunities lost there.

So my beacons did not work perfectly, but I found that I had them in the back of my mind more than what any resolution would have been. I will set some new beacons for 2013 (stay tuned).

Let me indulge and recall some of the more vivid memories of 2012.

• My wife, Adele, crossed the stage receiving her PhD in Education. Congratulations! Certainly in our family that’s a milestone. If we were status-kind of people we could now make a fuss that we are Prof and Dr Botha. Must admit it sounds good, but way to formal to either of our likings.
• This was the first year that i did not have some reading of final dissertations or theses during the december break. Thanks guys, especially the two that handed in well in time so that we even had the results prior to the break. Which brings me to the next points:
• Congratulations to Ishmael Makitla on finishing his MTech IT. In April he’ll graduate cum laude.
• A big applause to Laurie Butgereit who finished her PhD. Some excellent reviews from external examiners were received and I am looking forward to introduce you to the congregation during the April 2013 graduation ceremonies.
• With the help of my very conscientious students 1 journal paper and 7 conference papers appeared during 2012. Ladies and gentlemen, as your co-author, I salute you!
• I am truly blessed with kids that are hard-working in school – the results shows. I don’t think a dad can be more proud of his kids than I am – well done!
• November was a particularly long month as I was away from home in Frankfurt, Germany for the month. There I taught the Mobile Business I course at Goethe University. Packing a semester course into a month was quite heavy going…
• This December was true off-time. Fourteen days camping at Hartenbos provided a much required break. Truth be told, I don’t plan on doing much till middle January – bliss, it is.

2012 indeed was a good year! I am thankful to our Heavenly Father for all the blessings received.

I know I am ready for 2013. What about you?

to dig deeper, to find three words that could be used as lighthouses to guide you through stormy seas, that can be used as flags on the battlefield of your challenges, words that will bolster you and give you a direction that goes beyond the goals you might attach as a result of these words.

So I’ve thought about words for this year and realised that what gets in my way quite often is that I take life way too seriously, I need to simplify and get more joy out of the things I do. I’m going to attempt to do that through using 3 P-words as beacons:  prioritise, purge and play.

Prioritise. To prioritise properly I will have to constantly ask myself: “Why?” “What positive contribution does it make in my personal or professional life?” Of course to be effective I’ll also have to figure out exactly what I really want to achieve.

Purge. Priorities will allow me to purge things from my life – unnecessary activities, for one – but also other stuff. I’m a hoarder of stuff; that will change. To simplify life I need to go with the maxim: less is more. No I’m not going to go totally Zen on you, but unclutter, I will.

Play. I need to be less serious and go more for having fun. Ok, so I’m a nerd, so my idea of fun and play may be a little bit different than others. However, I am in the lucky position to be in a job where I can define a lot (unfortunately not all) of what I do. I don’t think I’ve been taking enough advantage of that.

I hope that thinking about the three P’s can help me simplify my life.  Join me on my journey in 2012 – together we can make it an awesome year!

Have any words that you define your 2012 by? Why not share them with me (and the rest of the world)  in the comments…

Interested in knowing how I am doing? Keep reading my blog and make sure you subscribe via e-mail, RSS, or the Facebook page…

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• My Three Words for 2012 (suzemuse.com)
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